CHAPTER 18 — Wednesday, 20 June

“Guinness or Caffrey’s?” No Neck asked.

Kit nodded, without thinking, and reached the last free table in Paddy’s Tavern a second or so before three Australian backpackers who took one look at No Neck’s tattoos and the bleakness in Kit’s face and decided they’d rather stand at the bar.

No Neck sighed. “I’ll get Guinness,” he said.

Slitting open a buff envelope, Kit shook its contents onto the rickety table in front of him. It was just before 1 pm, two days after Kit met Ms. Suzuki and the promised copy of Yoshi’s will had finally been cleared with Mr. Togo himself for collecting.

Getting the beers while Kit read the will was No Neck’s idea of tact. A gesture No Neck promptly ruined by banging two pints of Guinness onto the table and demanding to know exactly what the will said.

“Nothing good,” said Kit, killing half of his pint in one go. Having skimmed the document, he read it again more carefully. Ms. Suzuki had kindly included a notarised English translation, but Kit felt he should read the original. It was handwritten and the writing was Yoshi’s own. There was something harsh about knowing this was probably the last piece of her writing he’d see.

Yoshi’s will was a very simple document, little more than a single page. She left everything to her sister. There was no reference to a loan from Kit and the bar was barely mentioned. The will had been drafted three months earlier and Kit didn’t recognise the name of either witness.

“You okay?” asked No Neck.

“Sure,” said Kit. “Everything’s great.”

No Neck left to get another two beers without being asked. And when he came back it was with the beers, a bowl of udon noodles, and a pair of disposable chopsticks. “Eat,” he said, dumping his tray on the table in front of Kit.

“What about you?”

“Micki made noodles for breakfast,” said No Neck. “You look as if you haven’t eaten in weeks.”

“Micki?”

The huge man actually blushed. “She’s looking after me,” he said. “Just a temporary thing.”

The trucks were gone and the jack hammer stood silent when Kit and No Neck reached the site where Pirate Mary’s had been. Someone had swept grit from the road and piled it into a heap. A handful of cigarette ends and a broken polystyrene cup were caught in the sweepings and now mixed with dirt like artifacts from some strange archaeological dig. The concrete foundations they’d seen on their last visit had been reduced to rubble and carried away.

Coming Soon, announced a sign. Executive Manshon. 9 Apartments. South Facing. A picture on the board showed an elegant block filling the area where Pirate Mary’s and its parking space had been.

Where jagged foundation once stood the jack hammer had exposed a well. The slab that originally closed off the well shaft was cracked down the middle and someone had used a crow bar to shift the smaller of two pieces. Kit knew this because the bar still stood beside a broken section of slab and both leaned against the low wall around the well.

“You can’t go in,” No Neck protested, when Kit tried the new metal gate.

“I own this place.”

“Maybe,” said No Neck. “But it’s still padlocked. Talk to Mr. Togo in the morning…”

“I own this place,” repeated Kit, rattling the fence. He felt hands grip his shoulders from behind and the bozozoku lifted him aside.

“Leave it,” said No Neck. “Learn when to walk away.”

“I can’t,” said Kit.

Dark eyes looked at Kit from a face that would scare hardened criminals, the light from a street lamp falling across the bozozoku’s cheek like a scar. “This matters that much?” he said.

“Yes,” said Kit, “it does.”

“You want to tell me why?” The bozozoku stood between Kit and the gate, his head bent slightly to show that he was ready to listen. Kit knew almost nothing about No Neck and the man knew even less about him, it was one of the things that let them remain friends. “I mean,” said No Neck. “It’s not as if you and Yoshi even liked each other.”

“It’s not just Yoshi,” admitted Kit. “It’s the way it’s all getting whitewashed. No bomb, tragic accident. No bar, new apartments. I feel like a ghost in my own life. I want the bar back.”

No Neck considered that.

“Okay,” he said.

The metal fence was designed so that sections locked together. It should have been possible to separate one section from another merely by lifting. Unfortunately practise turned out to be very different from theory.

An old woman in a yukata had appeared from one of the few remaining wooden houses, a building even more ramshackle than the bar had been. And Mr. Ito now stood at the edge of the darkened graveyard, leaning on his broom. Both were watching intently and neither looked like being much help.

“We need more people,” Kit said, looking round.

“Tomorrow,” promised No Neck. “We’ll have lots of people. Let me make some calls first.”

“Want to talk about Yoshi?” asked No Neck, a few hours later, after one of the many calls he’d promised to make delivered them to another bar. With No Neck it was always a bar, unless that was just Tokyo.

“No,” Kit said. “I don’t think I do.”

“Okay,” said No Neck. “You ever wondered what it was you and Yoshi had in common?”

“I just said…”

“You’re not talking about it,” said No Neck. “I am. You ever wonder?”

Kit shook his head.

“Nothing,” said No Neck. “That was what you had in common…All those empty rooms. No television, no radio, no computers. Four floors of your own building in central Tokyo and the only room you bothered to decorate was the bar. Everything else was just storage space, without the storage.”

“Yeah,” said Kit. “Probably.”

“Does that sound like a marriage to you?”

Kit looked at him.

“She didn’t register it,” said No Neck, “because that way Yoshi could walk away…”

“If she needed,” said Kit.

No Neck nodded.

“Look,” Kit said. “You want to tell me what happened that night?”

Kit and No Neck sat in Seventh Gear, a biker shack on the northwest edge of Kabukicho, built under a raised section of the Seibu Shinjuku line. And Kit had earned his share of stares and comments just by pushing his way through its bead curtain. No Neck had to do some quick talking, his share of stares, shoulder slapping, and arm gripping before Kit’s presence became accepted.

“Sure,” said No Neck, taking off his shades to reveal bruises purple enough to make a goth rainbow. “Why not? She shopped me to the cops…The cops decided to beat the crap out of me, repeatedly.”

“Shit,” said Kit. “You know why?”

No Neck snorted. “Why do you think?” he said. “By then, they wanted me to sign a confession saying my friends bombed your bar.”

“They gave you a translation?”

“I can read Japanese.”

Kit stared at him. “You’re worse than me,” he said. “Everyone knows that.”

No Neck looked embarrassed. “I can read it,” he said. “And talk Japanese, if I must.”

“So why the me no speaks stuff?”

“Think about it,” said No Neck. “Why does Micki keep coming round to my apartment?”

“To teach you…” Kit stopped.

“Yeah.” The huge man smiled. “I’ve been here for twenty-five years,” he said. “Remember Madori? Namiko? Mai? They all wanted to teach me Japanese. You’d be surprised how many of those lessons ended up in bed.”

Actually, Kit wouldn’t.

“The police knew it wasn’t me,” said No Neck, with a shrug. “But it would have been tidier. One gaijin bombs another, famous Japanese artist caught in the conflict…they came very close,” No Neck added.

“Close to what?”

“Getting their confession.” Upending his bottle, No Neck killed what was left of his Kirin. “Not sure what changed,” he said. “One moment some psycho has me in a cell, the next there’s a knock at the door and I’m alone on the floor with foot prints on my face.” The Australian checked he really had finished his beer and got up to fetch another.